6. VI
VI
He Who Pays
Elizabeth had been trying to persuade her uncle that Tudela would eventually kill them both, but only after first making them uncomfortably grateful for the opportunity.
Mr Gardiner buttered a piece of bread and twisted his neck to work out a cramp from the poor mattress. “My dear Lizzy, one ought not to condemn a whole town merely because its coffee is bitter, its beds hard, and its officials steeped in bribery.”
“It is generous in you,” said Elizabeth, “to leave them garlic for a fourth distinction, when they have worked so hard already at the first three.”
He laughed. “You are uncharitable when you are hungry.”
“Charity generally requires better sleep and a full stomach.”
The lodging-house servant chose that moment to sidle in with a pot that promised fresh coffee.
Elizabeth had learnt, however, not to hope for too much.
Pilar was perhaps sixteen, narrow and brown in a faded bodice, her black hair pinned back in a hurry and already escaping.
She set down the cups and a heel of bread.
”Gracias, Pilar,” said Mr Gardiner, in the few syllables of Spanish he trusted himself to pronounce.
Pilar gave him a startled smile, and Elizabeth another.
There was something like a friendship between them now, built over four days in which Pilar had helped Elizabeth adapt some of her Portuguese into something that passed for rough Galician.
The girl tapped the cup of coffee she had just poured, mimed a gagging motion, and rolled her eyes to heaven with such eloquence that Elizabeth nearly lost her countenance.
“You see?” Elizabeth said when she had gone. “The town is redeemed by one servant girl and your incurable optimism. A pity neither is legal tender.”
“I am glad it meets with your approval in some measure. Drink your coffee, Lizzy. I would like to see Herrera before he takes his siesta.”
She obeyed, because he looked tired. Under all his good humour, she knew he had been up half the night, setting figures against routes, routes against rumours, and all of them against the dwindling patience of creditors, muleteers, and the officials of a kingdom that seemed to run on delay as other countries ran on money.
Elizabeth had an altogether different cause for wariness today.
Mr Darcy was somewhere about, too. He never once seen her at supper last night, when she and her uncle had sat behind the great post that halved the room.
And she did not see him at the morning meal, but perhaps he took it in his room.
A man such as he would. His man had come back alone another attempt at the offices this morning, but she had not seen Mr Darcy himself all day.
She had told herself she did not care, and the lie was not among her better compositions.
A shout came up from belowstairs, and then another right over the top of it, and her uncle’s head was already up.
Boots struck the stair, more than one pair and coming fast, and outside the door, a woman’s voice climbed into a pitch that needed no Spanish at all.
Something went over in the common room with a crash that came up through the soles of Elizabeth’s feet. She was half out of her chair before she could even cry in alarm.
“Away from the door!” Her uncle was on his feet, one hand thrown out toward her. “Lizzy, away from it!”
The one voice below had become a dozen, all shouting at once, none of them asking.
Pilar did not knock. She fell in through the door white as ash, both hands at her mouth.
“Senor — senora — no — no —” She had Elizabeth’s sleeve in her fist, hauling at it, flinging her free hand back toward the passage, down at the floor, at the room beneath them.
And then she brought her two wrists together hard in front of her, and that needed no translating.
“Who?” Mr Gardiner caught her by the arm. “Pilar, who is it — who!”
“?Ingleses! ?El alcalde! ?Vega!”
Her uncle’s breath went out of him in a word she had never once heard him use.
Vega? The name was nothing to her. To him, it was the end of the world, and she saw it cross his face. He had her by both shoulders before she knew he had crossed the room.
“The kitchen. Now!”
“No! I am not leaving you —”
“You will leave me this instant!” He was already wrenching her round toward the inner door, his hands hard enough to hurt, his voice torn clean out of its usual shape. “If they take you beside me, I am finished, do you hear? Do not make me watch it! Go!”
Downstairs, something broke. A man barked an order. Another laughed, and the laugh was worse than the order.
“Venga, venga.” Pilar had her by the arm, pulling her back. Elizabeth let herself be pulled, because the sound coming up the stair had stopped being confusion and become something with terror and wrath behind it.
The kitchen struck her like a wall — heat, onion, smoke, the sour reek of a pot boiling over, unwatched.
Pilar turned one full circle, lost, then was all hands at once: a servant’s cap off its peg and jammed onto Elizabeth’s head, a fistful of flour dragged the length of her sleeve, her own kerchief hauled down round Elizabeth’s throat.
“No habla. No habla.” The girl’s whisper shook. “Aquí. Aquí.”
She shoved Elizabeth toward the angle where the hearth met the wall, where the hanging pans and a stack of baskets might hide a smaller woman than Elizabeth had ever been in her life.
Her uncle came to the threshold and no further. Behind him, the corridor was full of scuffles and shouts.
“Good thinking with the cap, Pilar. Keep it on — Lizzy, pull it over your eyes.”
“What is happening? Uncle, I do not understand what —” It was his face that stopped her. Her uncle, who had haggled with customs men and laughed at storms in the Channel, looking at her as though he had done her a murder.
“You are a kitchen girl. You do not know me. You have never seen me before in your life. If they ask you anything at all, you weep, and you point at Pilar.”
“Uncle!”
“I told your aunt this town was safe! I told her I would answer for you.”
“You did not know —”
“Tie the cap.”
Her hands did it. Pilar was already hauling her down behind the baskets, muttering more pleas to keep quiet. Her uncle crossed the little space between them and put his hand against the side of her head, once, the way he had when she was a child and had frightened herself in the dark.
“Whatever you hear from that room, you make no sound. Not one, Lizzy. If they take you, too, there is no one left to write to England, and no one to come for either of us. Do you see? You are the only part of this I can still put right.”
“No, no, do not! You cannot go out there!” She had his sleeve in both hands. “There must be someone, the consul, we can send to the consul! Uncle, please —”
The boots were at the turn of the passage.
“Say you will stay hidden until they are gone, and then you must find the consul and get out of Spain. Go back to England as soon as you can, Lizzy.”
“I will not —”
“Say it!”
She lowered her face like a scolded child. “I will stay hidden.” Her voice went to pieces on it.
He touched her cheek with the backs of his fingers, as though she were still six years old and crying over a broken thing.
“Forgive me, Lizzy. I brought you here, and I hope to God some mercy sees you safe.”
Then he straightened his coat, the way he did before entering a counting-house, and went out to meet them.
Pilar dragged her down by the wrist, and the girl was shaking so that the pewter spoons on the shelf above them touched and rang, touched and rang — a thin, senseless music Elizabeth would have given anything to stop.
Then the passage filled. Boots on the stair and boots overhead, doors going in above her, a man somewhere shouting the same word again and again as though repetition were a kind of law.
She could see nothing. She had a hand’s breadth between two baskets and the pans hanging in front of that, and beyond it the kitchen doorway, and beyond that, a slice of passage wall.
Her uncle was speaking somewhere beyond the wall, and she had never in her life heard him speak so — furious, at times profane, and thoroughly outraged.
Then she heard other men, mostly English and all demanding justice — someone protesting his papers, someone else demanding a consul. There was an old man crying out in what might have been Dutch, and another who sounded like an Englishman from no shire she had ever heard of. American, perhaps?
But under all of it, again and again, the same Spanish words, and the same answers coming back in the same order, until she understood that she was not listening to an arrest at all. She was listening to a transaction being conducted at the top of a man’s voice.
“?Hay multa!” — There is a fine — and then a great deal she could not follow, and then, patiently, as one explains a simple thing to a child: “El que paga, se va. El que no, viene con nosotros.”
She had that one entire. He who pays, goes. He who does not, comes with us.
Somebody in the passage began to argue in outraged English about the laws of nations. A boot went into something soft and the argument stopped.
“?Cuánto lleva encima?” How much are you carrying? “?Todo! ?Vacíe los bolsillos!” All of it. Empty your pockets.
Then the sound she would think of afterward with the most horror, because it was so ordinary — coin going down on a table. A purse, from the weight of it. Somebody’s whole travelling money, and after it a man’s voice, hoarse with relief, saying gracias, gracias, gracias — thanking them.
The voices stopped while it was counted.
“No alcanza.” It is not enough.
And then, without any change of tone whatever, as though the man had asked for a second cup and been refused, the officer said, “Lleváoslo.”
Take him away.